CFD Online Discussion Forums - Porous panel for airflow over a radiator with simpleFoam?

Hi All,

I’m running aerodynamic simulations on a scratch designed – built car, one of the areas of interest to me is the airflow through the radiator and what’s happening in the ducting leading to the radiator and where the air is going after passing through it and so on.

At the moment the complete car with radiator is a single stl file. The radiator is modelled reasonably realistically from measurements taken from the real thing. However getting a realistic mesh created using snappyhexmesh is proving difficult and frankly I’m sure that I’m not going about this in the right way.

What I think I should be doing is defining the radiator as a porous panel in some way, the caveat being that as it’s a radiator the flow needs to pass through it normal to the surface.

Does this sound like the correct approach? If so could someone point me at an example of such a thing?

BTW I’m pretty happy just have got to this stage, being able to get to the point where I can move onto tackling the next level of detail seems a long way from where I started a month or two ago.

Thanks.